Paragon Walk (16 page)

Vespasia smiled, and there was dry, faraway humor and regret in her face, an infinity of memories.

“My dear girl, everyone has secrets, unless they have lived no life at all. And even they, poor souls, imagine they have. It is almost an admission of defeat not to have a secret of some kind.”

“Phoebe?”

“Hardly one to kill over,” Vespasia shook her head slowly. “The poor soul is losing her hair. She wears a wig.”

Charlotte recalled Phoebe at the funeral, her hair sliding one way and her hat the other. How could she feel so sharply sorry for her and at the same time want to laugh? It was so unimportant, and yet it would be painful to Phoebe. Unconsciously she touched her own hair, thick and shining. It was her best feature. Perhaps if she were losing it, it would matter enormously. She too would feel insecure, belittled, somehow naked. The laughter vanished.

“Oh,” there was pity in the word, and Vespasia was looking at her with appreciation. “But as you say,” Charlotte collected herself and went on, “hardly a matter to murder over, even if she were capable of it.”

“She wouldn’t be,” Vespasia agreed. “She is far too silly to do anything so big so successfully.”

“I was thinking of the purely physical side,” Charlotte replied. “She couldn’t manage that, even if she’d a mind to.”

“Oh, Phoebe is stronger than she looks,” Vespasia sat back in her chair, staring up at the ceiling in recollection. “She could murder him all right, with perhaps a knife, if she had lured him somewhere she could simply leave him. But she has not the nerve to carry it off afterward. I remember when she was a girl, about fourteen or fifteen, she took her elder sister’s lace petticoat and pantaloons and cut them down to fit herself. She was as cool as you like doing it, but then, when she came to wear them, she was so stricken with fear, she wore her own on top in case anything should catch her skirt and the better ones be seen. As a result she looked ten pounds heavier and not in the least attractive. No, Phoebe might do it, but she has not the endurance to carry it off.”

Charlotte was fascinated. How little one guessed of people when one saw them only in the single dimension of a few days or weeks; how they lacked all the substance of the past. They seemed almost flat, like cardboard, with all the depth gone.

“What other secrets are there?” she asked. “What else did Fulbert know?”

Vespasia sat up and opened her eyes wide.

“My dear child, I wouldn’t begin to guess. He was unbearably nosy. His main preoccupation in life was to acquire uncharitable information about others. If at last he found something too big for him, I cannot but say he richly deserved it.”

“But what else?” Charlotte was not going to give up so easily. “Who else? Do you think he knew who killed Fanny, and that was it?”

“Ah!” Vespasia breathed out slowly. “That, of course, is the real question. And I’m afraid I have no idea. Naturally I have been over and over everything I know. To tell the truth, I expected you to ask me.” She looked at Charlotte hard. Her old eyes were very clear, very clever. “And I would warn you, my girl, to keep your tongue a little stiller than you have done so far. If indeed Fulbert did know who killed Fanny, it served him ill. At least one of the secrets in Paragon Walk is a very dangerous matter indeed. I don’t know which of them brought Fulbert Nash to his death, so leave them all alone!”

Charlotte felt the cold ripple through her, as if someone had opened an outside door on a winter day. She had not thought of personal danger before. All her anxieties had been for Emily, that she might learn of weakness, selfishness in George. She had not feared violence, not even to Emily, let alone to herself. But, if there were a secret so dreadful in Paragon Walk that Fulbert had lost his life merely because he knew it, then to betray curiosity at all would be dangerous, and knowledge itself would be fatal. Surely the only secret like that must be the identity of the rapist. He had killed Fanny to protect that. There couldn’t be two murderers in the Walk—could there?

Or had Fulbert stumbled on some other secret, and his victim, already prompted by the one so-far-successful murder, simply copied the same resolution to his problem? Thomas had said that crime begot crime; people imitated, especially the weak and sick in mind, the opportunists.

“Do you hear me, Charlotte?” Vespasia said somewhat abruptly.

“Yes! Oh, yes, I do.” Charlotte recalled herself to the present, the sunlit withdrawing room and the old lady in ecru-colored lace sitting opposite her. “I don’t speak to anyone except Thomas about it. But what else? I mean, what other secrets do you know?”

Vespasia snorted. “You won’t be told, will you!”

“Don’t you want to know?” Charlotte met her eyes squarely.

“Of course, I do!” Vespasia snapped. “And if I die for it, at my time of life it doesn’t matter! I shall almost certainly die soon anyway. If I had anything useful to say, don’t you think I would have said it? Not to you, but to your extraordinary policeman.” She coughed. “George has been dallying with Selena. I have no proof of it, but I know George. As a child he played with other children’s toys if he felt like it, and ate other children’s sweets. He always gave the toys back, and he was always generous with his own. Used to everything being his anyway. Trouble with an only child. You have a child, don’t you? Well, have another!”

Charlotte could think of no adequate reply to this. She had every intention of having another, when the good Lord should so choose. Anyway, her concern was for Emily now.

Vespasia guessed it.

“He knows that I know,” she said gently. “He is far too frightened at the moment to do anything foolish. In fact he turns decidedly green every time Selena comes anywhere near him. Which isn’t very often, except to try and show the Frenchman that she is sought after. Silly creature! As if he cared!”

“What other secrets?” Charlotte pressed.

“None of any value. I cannot think Miss Laetitia would harm anyone because they knew she had a scandalous love affair thirty years ago.”

Charlotte was stunned.

“Miss Laetitia? Laetitia Horbury?”

“Yes. Quite secret, of course, but very burning at the time. Haven’t you noticed Miss Lucinda always making cutting little remarks to her about morals, and so forth? The poor creature is so jealous it is eating her alive. Now, if Laetitia had been killed, I could understand it. I have frequently thought that Lucinda would poison her in a shot, if she dared. Except she would be lost without her. Devising new ways of observing her own moral superiority is her chief enjoyment in life.”

“But how can it hurt? Laetitia knows it is only envy?” Charlotte was fascinated.

“Good heavens, no! They never discuss it! They each imagine the other does not know! What would be the pleasure or the savor of it if it were all in the open?”

Again Charlotte was torn between pity and laughter. But then, as Vespasia had said, it was hardly a matter over which Fulbert could have lost his life. Even if all Society knew, it would do Miss Laetitia little harm; in fact it might rather enhance her interest. Miss Lucinda would be the one to suffer by comparison. Then her jealousy might well be unendurable.

Before she could pursue the matter any further, Emily returned from the kitchen hurt and in short temper. Apparently she had had some altercation with the scullery maid, who was frightened out of her wits that the bootboy was after her, and Emily had told her not to be so stupid. The girl was as plain as a coal scuttle, and the bootboy had his sights set a good deal higher.

Vespasia reminded her she had been advised not to go, which only added fuel to the fire of Emily’s temper.

Charlotte excused herself as soon as she could, and in ill-grace Emily ordered her a carriage to take her home.

Of course Charlotte had regaled Pitt with everything she had heard, plus her own evaluation of it, almost as soon as he had come in the door, and although he knew that most of it would be irrelevant, no more than trivia to the case, yet momentous to those concerned, still he bore them at the back of his mind when he went out the following day to continue his investigations.

There had been no trace of Fulbert anywhere. Seven bodies had been found in the river, two of women, almost certainly prostitutes, one child, probably fallen in by accident and too feeble to cry out or splash for help; probably an unwanted mouth to feed anyway, put out to beg as soon as it was old enough to speak intelligently. The other four had been men but, like the child, beggars and outcasts. Certainly none of them could conceivably have been Fulbert, however abused or molested. It had taken more than a few days to bring them to such a degree of emaciation.

All the hospitals and morgues had been checked, even the workhouses. The sector of the police who were most familiar with the opium rooms and the brothels had been asked to keep an eye and an ear open—to ask questions would be pointless—but there had been no glimmer of him at all. To search the rookeries, of course, was impossible. As far as every human inquiry could ascertain, Fulbert Nash had disappeared from the face of London.

So there was nothing to do but go back to the Walk and pursue it again from there. Accordingly nine o’clock in the morning found him in Lord Dilbridge’s morning room awaiting his lordship’s pleasure. It was some quarter of an hour before he appeared. He was extremely neat—his valet would have seen to that—but there was a vague and rather disheveled look about his face. Obviously he was either unwell, or had had a wild night immediately previous. He stared at Pitt, as if he had trouble recalling precisely who the footman had said he was.

“Inspector Pitt, from the police,” Pitt helped him.

Freddie blinked, then irritation focused in his eyes.

“Oh dear, is this still about Fanny? The poor child is gone, and the wretched creature who did it is miles away by now. I don’t know what on earth you think any of us can do about it? The back streets of London are full of thieves and blackguards. If you fellows did your jobs properly and cleaned up some of them, instead of asking damn fool questions around here, this sort of thing wouldn’t happen!” He blinked and rubbed something out of his eye. “Although I suppose, to be fair, we should be more careful who we hire as servants. But really, there isn’t anything more I can do about it now, and certainly not at this time in the morning!”

“No sir,” Pitt at last had the opportunity to speak without interrupting. “It isn’t about Miss Nash. I called with regard to Mr. Fulbert Nash. We still have no trace of him—”

“Try the hospitals, or the morgue,” Freddie suggested.

“We have done so, sir,” Pitt said patiently. “And the doss houses, the opium rooms, the brothels, and the river. Also the railway stations, the port, the lighter men as far down the river as Greenwich and as far up as Richmond, and most of the cab drivers. No one has told us anything.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Freddie said angrily. His eyes were bloodshot, and he kept blinking. Freddie screwed up his face in an effort to think clearly. “He’s got to be somewhere. He can’t have vanished!”

“Quite,” Pitt agreed. “So having searched everywhere I can to find him, I am obliged to come back here to see if I can deduce where he might have gone, or if not where, at least why.”

“Why?” Freddie’s face fell. “Well, I suppose he was—well—no—I don’t know what I suppose. Never really thought about it. Didn’t owe money, did he? Nashes have always been well off, so far as I know, but he is the youngest brother, so maybe he hadn’t so much.”

“We thought of that, sir, and we checked. His bank gave us access to their records, and he is in good funds. And his brother, Mr. Afton Nash, assures us that he had no financial problems. We have found no mention of any debt in any of the usual gambling clubs.”

Freddie looked worried.

“Didn’t know you people could get into that kind of thing! What a man gambles is his own affair!”

“Certainly, sir, but where a disappearance is concerned, possibly a murder—”

“Murder! Do you think Fulbert was murdered? Well,” he pulled a terrible face and sat down rather abruptly. He looked at Pitt through his fingers. “Well, I suppose we knew that, if we were honest. Knew too much, Fulbert, always was a bit too clever. Trouble is, he wasn’t clever enough to pretend to be a little less clever.”

“Very well put, sir.” Pitt smiled. “What we need to know is which of all his clever remarks was the one that backfired on him? Did he know who raped Fanny? Or was it something else, possibly even something he didn’t actually know, but implied he did?”

Freddie frowned, but the high color in his face fled, leaving the broken veins standing out. He did not look at Pitt.

“Don’t know what you mean! If he didn’t actually know it, why should anyone kill him? Bit risky, isn’t it?”

Pitt explained patiently. “If he were to have said to someone, I know your secret, or words to that effect, he would not need to have spelled it out. If there really were something dangerous enough, the person would not wait to see if Fulbert would tell it or not.”

“Oh. I see. You mean, just kill him anyway, be on the safe side?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Rubbish! Few odd affairs, maybe, but no real harm in that. Good God! Lived in the Walk for years, every Season, of course, not in the winter, you understand?” The perspiration was standing out on his forehead and lip. He shook his head, as if he might at once clear it and drive out the loathsome idea. After a moment his face lit up. “Never thought of anyone like that. You’d better look at the Frenchman; he’s the only one I don’t know.” He waved his hand as if he could wash Pitt away like a petty annoyance. “Seems to have plenty of means, and decent enough manners, if you like that sort of thing, bit too precise for me. But no idea where the man comes from, could be anywhere. A sight too easy with the women. And come to think of it, he never told us who his family was. Always be spacious of a fellow when you don’t know who his family is. Look him up, that’s my advice to you. Try the French police, maybe they’ll help you?”

It was something Pitt had not thought of, and he mentally kicked himself for the oversight, the more so because it had taken a fool like Freddie Dilbridge to point it out to him.